The author, cleaning out one of Better Farm's chicken coops. Photo/Lily Chiu

By Jackson PittmanHere at Better Farm, we have a lot of things that stink. Stinky compost
bins, the stinky dogs, and of course, stinky chickens. In
fact, it's not that our chickens reek especially bad, its more that they
leave a lot of droppings—and for a chicken, steering clear of its own excrement doesn't rate high on the priority list. Some of you may wonder why we have so many chickens when they produce so much more poop than eggs. Well, the answer is simple—and beautiful.

The chicken poop (as most gardeners would know) is excellent fertilizer!
Once it is broken down, chicken manure has 4 times as much nitrogen, 11 times as much
phosphorous, and 2.5 times as much potassium than horse manure (2.8 percent nitrogen,2.3 phosphorous, 1.7 potassium). While it's true that we don't
want to put the dung directly onto the crops because the nitrogen and
bacteria levels are so high it can damage or contaminate the vegetables we
grow, we still have plenty of other things we can do with our vast amounts
of chicken droppings (really... they poop a lot... it's 33 chickens).

At this time of year, when the garden isn't producing nearly as many vegetables as it does at its peak, there's plenty of open space that we're mulching with hay and cardboard (the cardboard is to keep weeds from
popping up, and the hay is to get broken down by the snow and turn to fresh
soil). Since we have our chickens pooping on hay, on top of cardboard, it's
ridiculously easy to find a nice empty spot that could used some extra
insulation and let the fertile chicken manure get broken down with the hay
over the winter to make the soil all the richer. This is our current
technique, but there are plenty of other uses for the chicken poop we have
in such abundance.
So this is the short list of chicken manure uses that I (as the
farm intern) was surprised and interested by:

Biogas!!Whaaat! It's crazy, right?... The same chicken poop that can easily gross
out the inexperienced onlooker can be converted to natural fuel? This
innovativeprocess is done by mixing the droppings with a by-product of
ethanol production to produce a powerful biogas, but the real magic of it
is done simply by the bacteria living in the poop! It's just three simple
steps...
Stage one: One bacteria type reduces the manure to fatty acids.
Stage two: Another bacteria type reduces the fatty acids to acetic acid.
Stage three: The third bacteria type turns the acetic acid into bio-methane
gas.
Incredible, right? Bio-methane gas out of poop through the natural cycle of
anaerobic bacteria... life is beautiful.

Bio-Oil?!? Let's leave this one to the expert's explanation: "First, the manure needs to be dried so it can be burned... That makes it
possible to move to the next step: rapidly heating the mixture in a
bubbling, fluidized bed reactor that has no oxygen. It's a process called
fast pyrolysis. The process thermochemically breaks the molecular bonds in
the mixture. It produces charcoal that can be used to enrich soil. And it
produces vapors that are condensed to a thick, dark bio-oil."
Wow... all that from chicken poop. I'm practically speechless. Although
this process doesn't sound like something we're ready to do at Better Farmyet, it really changes the way you see the manure, and the way we treat
dispose of our waste.

Chicken Manure TEA?!?!?Not the kind you can drink! During the growing season, the compost pile can
get full pretty quickly and when there's tons of chicken poop it can be
nice to find a more direct use for it without having to way for it to
decompose. Now there are many ways to make fertilizer, but this one in
particular is nice because it creates a liquid you can spray your crops
with to give them nutrients!
To make fertilizer tea, scoop the chicken manure into a burlap bag. Then,
throw a rock into the bag to weigh it down and place the whole thing into a
35-gallon garbage can. Fill the garbage can with water and let it sit for
about three weeks. Once the three weeks are over, you will have
nutrient-rich chicken manure fertilizer tea as the water becomes infused
with the nutrients from the chicken manure. You can use this fertilizer tea
to water your plants to give them a vitamin boost.

Well, that about wraps up our summary on the fun side of poop. I hope you
guys enjoyed it as much as I enjoy it twice a week! Remember, all waste has
a purpose!

Nicole Caldwell is a self-taught environmentalist, green-living savant and
sustainability educator with more than a decade of professional writing
experience. She is also the co-founder of Better Farm and president of
betterArts. Nicole’s work has been featured in Mother Earth News, Reader’s
Digest, Time Out New York, and many other publications. Her first book,
Better: The Everyday Art of Sustainable Living, is due out this July
through New Society Publishers.

Better Farm

Setting up for betterArts’ Children’s Room at this year’s North Country Goes Green Irish Fest in Watertown March 16-18. Thanks to the volunteers who came out to support our sister organization, which functions to expand access to the arts for all. www.betterarts.org

Snack break on a snowy afternoon.

Our compost initiative is expanding! Many thanks to @clayton_food_co_op for getting on board by donating food scraps to Better Farm to be fed to our sanctuary animals and turned into soil. Food waste accounts for up to 40 percent of “garbage” — so separating scraps out of what we throw away means a massive reduction in landfill waste. Compost contributes to soil regeneration, and fresh food scraps replace or supplement animal feed, reducing carbon emissions associated with food processing and transportation. Composting is a radical act we can all be doing several times every single day.

When archaeologists visit Better Farm.

February 28. Canadian border of New York. Garlic already sprouting. #thesethingsarenotnormal

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A little pre-spring dirt worship with the girls.

Get on the bus! Registration for our 2018 sustainability program is now open, with lots of dates to choose from! bit.ly/2oAFFnh

#farmlife

Very excited to announce our new partnership with DiPrinzio’s Kitchen in Clayton! The fine-dining Italian restaurant and catering company is saving all its table scraps to be used as Better Farm’s gardens and fed to the pigs and chickens. Big ups to @mollicathebaker for facilitating this fabulous new project!

Neigh-bors Riddler, Blaze and Red enjoying the breakfast buffet.

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#mondaymood

Sunday Funday with Buffalo the alpaca.

Nice haul today from a standing dead oak tree. #woodstoveseason

Somebody is SO EXCITED about all this fresh, organic hay! Thanks to everyone near and far who generously made donations to keep the hay supply flush alllllll winter long. Better Farm and all its beautiful beasts love you! 🐓🐖🦒🐴🦆🐥